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Monday, July 28, 2008

Photo Parade - Frustration

There is a bit of a story:

So this picture represents frustration to me. This is my husband sanding the wall in the dining room of the house we bought in 2006.

We purchased this house just about 2 months after we got married. As we were still renting we decided to do as much work in December as we could before we moved in. Yeah, didn't think that one out much.

Basically we thought this room would be simple to update. Take down the wallpaper, throw on some primer and a couple coats of wine colored paint and presto....a beautiful dining room!

Um, not so much. The person before used industrial strength wallpaper with NASA approved adhesive. We tried every wallpaper removal technique suggested but the paper just didn't want to come off without taking parts of the top layer of wall with it. Basically it was just a matter of spraying with liquid wallpaper remover and then taking our wallpaper steamer and just scraping small sections off at a time. *Annoying*

This is how the project went:

Week 1 - remove wallpaper. Sand walls and wipe down walls to remove dust.Week 2 - Prime the walls. See that the primer alone is not going to cover up the damage that was done to the walls (we didn't think so but the surface was easier to work with now) so then I proceed to re-mud (joint compound stuff) ALL three walls. This also took forever.Week 3 - Terry then had to sand down all the walls to create a nice smooth surface. I think we are STILL finding dust from his sanding around our house....that stuff goes everywhere. Then wiped down all the walls again. We then primed the walls and then finally painted the walls with 2 coats of paint.

This little project put us a good 2 weeks behind our anticipated timeline to get stuff finished in our house before we moved in. And of course we did not get everything completed like we wanted. We did become great friends with the people at Sherwin Williams!

This was truly frustration.

You can even visit my "old" blog Renovation, click here, to read about our frustrations with the dining room and to see other pics!

Most of the renovations we did in our house was taking down wallpaper and painting as well and we ALSO tried to do everything in a month. (We also completely gutted and redesigned our kitchen - our kitchen is still not what I would consider "done" and it's been two years.)

Note to homeowners: Please do not wallpaper over wallpaper, that's just horrible and makes the person who owns the house after you cuss. Not nice. Also, please don't wallpaper the entire room, ceiling included. Again, the cussing. And, normal adhesive works fine, especially because most people do not share your affinity for powder blue flowers and will want to tear it off the minute they see it. Thank you.